Love poems, poetry, poets, emo,

Words imprinted on a signby Goya glowingwhite against a surfacenearly white:the sleep of reasonthat produces monsters.He is sitting on a chairhis head slumpedresting on his armsor on the marble table,pencil set aside,his night coat open

thighs exposed.All things that fly at nightfly past him.Wings that brush an ear,an ear concealed,a memory beginningin the house of sleep.His is a world where owlslive in palm trees,where a shadow in the skyis like a magpie,white & black are colorsonly in the mind,the cat you didn’t murdersprings to life,a whistle whirling in a cup,gone & foregone,a chasm bright with eyes.There is a cave in Spain,a fecal underworld, where bats are swarmingamong bulls,the blackness ending in a wallhis hands rub up against,a blind man in a painted world,amok & monstrousbanging on a rock.

IN GOYA'S WORLD

Flesh down to bonea feeble skinthat barely covers her,her empty mouthpushed up against her nose,her eyes shut tight,the two who kneel beside her,sister crones,squat bodies hoisting brooms,what do they spinso finely?In a corner of the roomthe bodies of dead babesare hanging,little molls like little dolls,the chins of childrensickly pricklystrings attachedto fingers. Elsewherein Goya’s worldcrones suck the juice frombabes jaws loose& brayingancient beings tucked in cowls,in coils,a basket at their feetfilled with babe’s bodies.It is too latetoo late,the bodies hang no longer,all have fallen,the women pass a daintybox from hand tohand, their fingersdig down deep,they slip the bones,the little seeds,between their lips,into their gullets,always still more to suck,still always hungry.

CODA, WITH DUENDES

Duendes sound a lasthurrah they squeezea bellows, scrub a dishwith greasy hands,a whisperin an ear bent downto listen.No one sees them.Over every duendefalls the shadowof a greater duende..Holy moly!Is this not a black sound,Mister Lorca?Pissing olive oilI isn’t what I seemsto be a poorpartakerbarrel overturned,the wine I swigsgone rancid.There is now an endto everything.What is fleshthey suck no more,they drive the foul caprichosout of sightCaprichos, Goya, Lorca,all my duendes,locked into a cageat dawn, evadingsleep & dreams,those whom they leavebehind them, fathersraising armsto heaven,screaming throughtheir emptymouths like cavernsblack holeswhere all lightis lost.Now is the time.From an ongoing series of fifty poems, the first half of which were published by Kadle Books in Barcelona and Tenerife as 25 Caprichos after Goya (2004), with translations into Spanish by Heriberto Yépez. The three printed here and a number of others from the second half of the series also appear in a limited edition, Homage to Goya, published by Brighton Press in 2008 with images and design by Ian Tyson.A COMMENTARY ON GOYA FROM POEMS FOR THE MILLENNIUM, VOLUME 3Written with Jeffrey Robinson

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together in a single imaginary being circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons. (F.G., announcement for Caprichos, February 6, 1799)

Not a poet in any ordinary sense of the word, Goya opens an exploration of the constructed dreamwork – a conduit for transformation & dis-ease, holding up a crooked mirror, to see the world askew & dangerous, but ineluctably real. His Caprichos, initiated in 1796 as a series of eighty etchings & aquatints, come complete with captions, later reinforced by editorial “explanations,” on some of which (the so-called Prado manuscript in particular) Goya himself may have been an informal collaborator. As he takes hold of the idea of “caprichos” – what had been whims or fancies in the works of others – he becomes, as Robert Hughes writes of him & them, “the first artist to use the word capricho to denote images that had some critical purpose: a vein, a core, of social commentary.” And it’s his alliance of this with a stunning sense of the fantastic – even the surreal – that makes him not only a forerunner of the “romantic” but, as others have noted, “the first modern artist and the last old master.”

In the notes to his early drawings for “The Sleep of Reason,” originally intended as the opening Capricho but finally positioned as Capricho 43, additional texts appear. As Hughes further describes them: “On the flank of the desk is written ‘Universal language [Ydioma universal]. Drawn and etched by Francisco de Goya in the year 1797.’ Then, below the design, we read in a pencil scribble: ‘The author dreaming. His only purpose is to root out harmful ideas, commonly believed, and to perpetuate with this work of the Caprichos the soundly based testimony of truth.’” That this “truth” incorporates images of witchcraft, animality, cannibalism, rape, & torture, often identified by him with those in power, made the Caprichos a target for censorship & inquisition as well as a sardonic & ominous reflection of Goya’s world & ours.

N.B. The alternative translation as “the Dream of Reason [that produces monsters]” adds an ambiguity to the reading that we shouldn’t overlook.

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